Introducing Suzy Lake

Introducing Suzy Lake ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO TORONTO NOVEMBER 5, 2014-MARCH 22, 2015 It was the chin hairs that did it. Really. They were curly, alternately gray or brown, and one emerged from an inflamed pimple. The others stuck out--as I myself know from experience these horrid things tend to do--at odd angles and in senseless places on the lower half of this made-up, obviously older woman's face. I was equally repulsed and comforted by the brutal truth in these courageous and culturally outrageous photographs, which I encountered on the website of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) under the exhibition title Introducing Suzy Lake. Scanning the summary, I discovered that Suzy Lake is sixty-seven years old, and has been producing powerful body of politically engaged photographic and performance work for over four decades. Two thoughts immediately crossed my mind. The first was, What way to make an introduction! and the second was, Where have you been all my life? The latter question was one I kept repeating to myself as I reviewed this emotionally profound and tremendously experimental retrospective. Rightfully devoting an entire floor to what I later realized was just fraction of Lake's work, the curators have organized the show around the three urban communities where Lake has lived: Detroit from birth to the age of twenty-one, Montreal for the next decade, and Toronto from age thirty-one onward. Initially I was perplexed by this curatorial decision, as the work could so easily have been arranged around the concerns of late twentieth-century feminists: social inequities, gender stereotypes, and the body. But according to Lake, she has always been influenced by and invested in her immediate community. Thus, grouping the works by her cities of residence encourages viewers to comprehend that Detroit's civil rights movements initiated Lake's awareness of how society shapes and constrains one's identity; that Montreal's small but highly experimental art scene allowed her to combine photography, performance, and her studies at the Theatre de Quat'Sous mime school; and that her final move to more cosmopolitan Toronto provided Lake greater exposure to the work of other artists and larger audience for her own work. But as I reviewed the show over the course of two days, I realized that this arrangement made sense for another reason, the same one that struck me when I saw the inordinate number of nose hairs in the image from the series Beauty at Proper Distance / In Song (2001-02), described earlier. This was the most honest recording of woman's chronological life I had ever encountered in all of my years as an art historian, and it literally moved me to tears. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As young woman trained to be a good wife and mother, Lake's investment in the women's liberation movement, Vietnam protests, and civil rights activity in mid-'60s Detroit forever altered her, provoking her to question the social construction of identities. This political awakening informed the identity work she would begin once she moved to Montreal in 1968. In On Stage (1972-74), video projection amended twice, Lake explored the ways in which fashion magazines and advertising dictate how women should present themselves in public, and eventually undermine their self-esteem when they realize how difficult it is to measure up. The first incarnation showed Lake dressed la mode, posing languorously in evening gowns or intently strolling down city streets in culottes and beret, hoping that mere mimicry was enough to indict such industries. Sadly, after the work was mistakenly derided for being narcissistic, Lake recognized that viewers needed more didacticism, and she added various texts, which explained that for women, role-playing is daily occurrence. The final incarnation inserted images of Lake in whiteface, which in mime studies represents position-zero: neutral state that negates the individual. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.